Seattle, Washington UFO Sighting (August 12, 1947) — FBI Files (D3P180)
A first saucer wave case from Seattle, Washington. On August 12th, multiple witnesses in Seattle observed a white, cylindrical object at approximately 35,000 feet, traveling southwest.
Background
On August 12, 1947, in Seattle, Washington, U.S. government investigators recorded an unidentified-object incident later released to the public on May 8, 2026 as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). The incident is one of the first wave of “flying saucer” reports that swept the United States after the Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947 and the Roswell incident of July 1947. The case was filed with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose Knoxville, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, and other field offices routed UFO reports to headquarters under the Bureau’s standing protocols for the protection of vital installations.
What the document records
On August 12th, multiple witnesses in Seattle observed a white, cylindrical object at approximately 35,000 feet, traveling southwest. The object appeared to reflect sunlight with a purplish tinge, and was examined with binoculars by one witness. Descriptions from all witnesses were consistent with each other.
The number of witnesses is not specified in the released document.
Verbatim from the file
“which was flying over his home in a southwest direction.”. “looked like a white dock moving, cylindrical in shape”. “reflected the light of the sun with a sort of purplish tinge.”
Type of case
The case is a visual sighting reported by ground or air observers.
Status
All records released under the PURSUE program are designated unresolved by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) by default. The federal government has not concluded that the events were anomalous, has not concluded that they were conventional, and has not ruled out either possibility. Conventional candidates for sightings of this period include experimental aircraft, weather balloons (especially the Project Mogul series in the late 1940s), atmospheric optical phenomena such as sundogs and lenticular clouds, and astronomical objects including Venus, the Moon, and meteors near the horizon.